Web Hosting, Virtual Dedicated Servers, and Clusters - My experiences

Hi Rammahi,
This brings me to notion that i need to do some more reviews of hosting companies as I have been through a few of them since i am a very heavy hosting user. I am always looking for the best value.

So depending on your needs and your budget these are my recommendations:

Under $7 contenders:
Godaddy.com : Their servers are reliable and never had a problem with ther linux system until I tried to load over 500 domains in my account. I was then told that I had network violation because I was redlining the server; this is understandable. But I must warn you that their console broke down before I got to the network violation; I had domains stuck in their system in limbo for weeks upon weeks, without any action in their system with several tickets. Godaddy is fairly good about customer service, but don't expect top notch ticket support for 7 dollars a month (I can also understand this; you are hardly paying for an hour worth of a persons time and their system is meant to be self-service in order to give you those cost-savings).

A eDealDomains.com - They have $3.99 Windows and Linux Hosting; but this limits you to one domain. For $7 you can get a shared hosting plan with 'unlimited' domains.

eDealDomains provide some better domain rates for .coms so is why I have an account with them. They have all the luxuries that Godaddy does from what i can tell; but they have same limitations that Godaddy does. You can find their hosting deals here: AllRightHosting.com


You can get all the benefits of the $1.99 domain with any non-domain purchase as well as free email, and free hosting with your domain purchase, etc. I ended up using a virtual dedicated server for my purposes and it seems to be working out since I get 500 gbytes of transfer per month.

ReliableSite.net - They deserve an honorable mention as I have an account with them and I have some of my major sites with them since I had to move off WebHost4Life.com. What they offer: Windows load/balanced clustered hosting solution compatible with PHP/MySQL projects. Since its Windows, you get ASP, ASP.NET. Cons: its not the cheapest, it seems to be a small operation, it can't handle everything I can throw at it. I did some research and a Windows 'Clustered' Solution seems to be limited to 4 (or was it 8?) Servers as compared to what I was looking for - something more akin to a Amazon Elastic Computing Cloud power for a shared hosting environment.

Alas, my friend pointed me out to mediatemple.net. I do not have an account with them, but I am very curious as their copy and graphics make me want to try it out. I think that I would have to end up going with the dedicated virtual solution, but at $50 it seems a bit expensive as compared to the $30 virtual dedicated server I have with edealdomains.com; with almost the same specifications. Mind you there do some to be a series of perks to media temple that make it a better product: it runs on a linux cluster service (I don't think that is the case for edealdomains.com, but I could be wrong). Media temple provides you with reseller tools for the service you are purchasing. Chances are you will only use a small portion of the resources allocated to you and they have provided you with whm/cpanel solution for reselling. They have a shared solution starting at $16.67 called the Grid, but its limited to 100 domains; so it doesn't work for me. But they do seem to have instant activation.